Fincher has said that he wanted to make a “franchise movie for adults,” and that’s a noble ambition; but, at times, the film seems more like it’s part of an adult-movie franchise. All the intrigue surrounding right-wing political conspiracies (the thriller material concerns a family of reclusive industrialists, and the mysterious disappearance of one of their relatives, 40 years earlier) is a MacGuffin for the putative enigma that is Lisbeth Salander. She’s the ink-stained super-genius of the title—a bisexual bad girl who’s fluent in source code and dismal at small talk. I found her unflappable competence tiresome—more convenient than mysterious—but Mara grabs one’s attention like a teenage drama queen whose period is verging on an exclamation point; her flat voice eeks out low on the register, filtered through a pout, her tongue not enunciating at full capacity, as if it has recently been pierced—by a lawn dart. But Lisbeth’s rape-revenge number, whatever its original intentions, comes off as embarrassingly crude: Sucker Punch feminism, furnished by Ikea. Her vengeance is a perfectly designed s&m fantasy; it titillates one’s prurience and then rewards it in the form of righteousness—which is even more perverted. Lisbeth is what repressed older men must think punkish young women are like. However, I should give Larsson and his fans some credit; his readers must be more than grown-up Twihards. (Should we call ’em Dragoons?) The novel is the first in the Millenium trilogy, and must have been written long before its author’s death in 2004. Its idealism both harkens back to the 1990s—when the Internet was still the Wild West, before the likes of Google and Facebook arrived to tame it—and resonates with the Year of the Protester. For Larsson—an investigative journalist like his klutzy hero (Craig), who recruits Lisbeth as an assistant—the enemy was the “financial mafia”; and, in his vision, this ubiquitous cabal with unlimited means can be beaten by an anarchic outsider armed with technical knowhow and an appetite for justice. That alone may be compelling enough to get past page five for. I guess it’s about time.

Contagion isn’t a mystery exactly. This study of a viral pandemic, the attempts to contain it, and the effect that has on modern society has the pull of an omnibus disaster thriller, the substance of a technical manual, and the form of an objet d’art: Imagine Richard A. Clarke recruiting for a war game at an Oscar afterparty, and hiring Annie Leibovitz to document it in a photo spread. Who but Soderbergh—except, maybe, a resurrected Robert Altman, after having received his doctorate in public health in heaven—could’ve pulled this off? (And don’t let’s forget the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, whose name has the ring of an over-the-counter ointment.) Soderbergh has carved a special place for himself in the canon, harboring an admirable fascination with the way things work and a polystylistic urge to slink under the seat of his director’s chair: a combo that has inevitably drawn him to the style and subject of bureaucracy. In their last go, The Informant! (2009), he and Burns made Matt Damon into a monkey wrench, the embodiment of human error in the space where Russell Crowe in The Insider once fit snugly; but despite his best efforts, Soderbergh seemed too close to his subject for his posture of ironic distance, and the satire got sticky. Apart from Dachau, AIDS, and the Trail of Tears, this is about as far from comedy as he could get; so the barrier between his audience and his obsessions is as thin in Contagion as a microscope slide.

But that doesn’t mean he and his team aren’t up to their old film-school tricks. If they had role models, they were probably Michael Mann (without the heavy muscularity) or, more likely, that fleet fox David Fincher (without the underlying aggression). (Cliff Martinez, who composed the electrified score, tweaks Trent Reznor down to the last decibel.) The editor, Stephen Mirrione, cuts with a headlock on woozy continuity and benefits from Soderbergh’s jarring use of static shots—an endowment, perhaps, from the late Sidney Lumet. The chromed contrasts in his imagery—this director hides behind his own camera and photographs under an assumed name—are enough to get your optic nerve hungover. It’s as if the action was reflecting off a glass skyscraper. What an odd place to spot one of the most beautiful-looking films of the year: a mantle ceded despite the angles—voyeuristic and belligerently imbalanced, crowded yet chillingly still. Composition and montage go it alone; Eisenstein would’ve been proud.

It’s a strange duck: gripping, more worthy of my admiration than adulation. The filmmakers try to maintain the good citizenship—or good box-office sense—that exudes apolitical airs. But coming as a product of sensitive people in sensitive times, one decade, to the month, after Sept. 11; coming when institutions are as obese as our children but rejected out of hand by legislators who want to tackle the budget like Jason with his chainsaw; and citizens who think this is done out of their best interests—Contagion is a real what-if horror movie, with a real agenda, or, at least, concern. The horror comes from making us aware of what we take for granted, much as recent changes in our culture have; and, unlike Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the scenario is not at a remove. There’s a reason for all this realism. When Congressman Paul was confronted about the government’s role in healthcare, during a recent debate, he muttered his preference for a halcyon time in which “our neighbors, our friends, our churches” would take care of the uninsured sick. This is a romantic view. And though he doubtfully had nightmare outbreaks like this one on his mind, it is within that blind spot that the role of government, at least in medical research, throbs with necessity. Globalization is, perforce, the antibody; it takes a massive mobilization of inter-governmental resources to get the disease in Contagion cured. But, as is revealed in the end, globalization is also the carrier. Responsibility is accepting the consequences of this framework, whether we approve of it or not. To go from macro to micro: Burns did add at least one political prism in the body of Jude Law, a crank blogger who starts out as a vox populi (his vade mecum—an indispensable one, I might add—seems to be The Shock Doctrine) and ends up a sellout, subject to the same human impulses as those he crusades against. (He’s possibly too tricky a plot device; his rhetoric wins arguments, but there’s no way to judge their basis in facts.) Laurence Fishburne, as the smooth public face of the C.D.C., is prey to human impulses, too—on that minor scale which is more telegenic. Unlike Apes, Contagion has a long view of what social networking would add to the equation, if not long enough. Damon is the only face of “real” America, the only one unaffiliated with the authorities; and though he’s game to transmogrify himself, and acts robustly, the filmmakers made a tactical mistake by not allowing him to emote more when we meet his daughter. They yield their humanity in the end, but are a touch too swift early on.

Soderbergh’s objective overview of global chaos is a little skimpy; if the film wigs you out a little, it’s in concept only. There’s no equivalent to the early scenes in the H.I.V. docudrama And the Band Played On (1993), when the experts’ bafflement was enough to keep me awake for an entire period of health class. (In a way, though, I was happy that he didn’t milk drug-store riots and supermarket sprees for end-of-the-world action, like when the ice-skating rink at Rockefeller Center spread across Manhattan in The Day After Tomorrow, and Jake Gyllenhaal was pit against wolves.) Another fault is in the form, which makes it hard for actors to come across. But players as diverse as Damon, Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Sanaa Lathan, Elliott Gould, Jennifer Ehle, and Gwyneth Paltrow—as the “Marion Crane”—do a lot with little time. What’s more, they inoculate a dense thriller against bad box office.

If the mad-scientist tragic inevitability doesn’t hook you as much as Shakespeare’s sometimes does, then maybe you’ll be sated by the way the insurgents break free of their monkey bars. The movie is sly only when it winks at its audience by nodding at its progenitor; but when one of the zookeepers sees Charlton Heston playing Moses on TV, it’s a genuinely clever joke. Caesar—the name really does flummox the historical allusion—doesn’t part the sea, but he does aim a fire hose at Dodge, who’s compromised by his own weapon of choice. The director, Rupert Wyatt, is inhumanly square when trucking purely in live-action (even Franco, stiff as a squiggle in 127 Hours and Howl, carries rigidity like a contagion); but he seems to have stored his imagination on a Mac hard drive. With Serkis as their ringleader, the motion-capture actors would’ve been impressive even without the state-of-the-art trimmings, covered extensively elsewhere; performers playing humans are rarely tasked with such gestural acting, and there’s certainly some kudos due to the techies who helped make their individuation possible. Predictably, the police called in to corner the apes on the Golden Gate Bridge are foolhardy, and their weapons technology is easily outmatched by the physical strength of their adversaries, and their cunning. (As well as by a convenient cumulus of Bay Area mist, and a little unconvincing writing: Since when are gorillas bullet-proof?) There are, however, two instances which, if they’d been sustained, might’ve made for a really stylish blockbuster: 1.) A shot of newspaper boys and joggers looking up at the palm-tree canopy when leaves start to fall unseasonably, and see the apes advancing; 2.) The sound of the apes trampling their way to Rodman’s slick corporate laboratory. The latter, a very simple special effect, might have been used to better advantage as a leitmotif for the apes’ rising action.

The plot has its own built-in simple special effect: its by-now familiar apocalyptic chic is compounded with a horrifying reversal of fortunes. If the only edge we humans have is our technical ingenuity—whether in the form of imagination or opposable thumbs—and we lose that to those species closer to nature who, by implication, we’ve mistreated, well—basically we’re screwed. There’s something primally unnerving about seeing a police cruiser wiped out by some refugees from the zoo—thwarting our so-called superiority with the very primitive bars we’ve caged them with. (It may be PETA propaganda, but they may have a point….) At the same time, however, this doomsday scenario puts us at a safe distance; to put it in the demotic: We’ve got 99 problems, but a baboon ain’t one. The prospect of nuclear war was the subtext back in ’68—it’s by no means incidental that Rod Serling, who’d already strolled through that territory many times before on The Twilight Zone, was one of that film’s writers. Nowadays, with our hopped up end-times expectations distended to the point of abstraction, it seems perverse that at our entertainments (not just our art and literature) we can sit back, relax, and take comfort in a mercifully quick bloodbath that leads to our everlasting oblivion. (If I had a crack team of researchers at my disposal—or at least a Netflix account—I’d love to see how much more often the world has ended in the past five-to-10 years of filmmaking than it did in the five-to-10 years prior.) I may be taking liberties with this movie’s climax, which makes it about as much a prequel to Contagion as it is to Planet of the Apes. But, even without subscribing whole-heartedly to the inevitability of man’s impending demise, I’m unsettled by the notion that we’ve become like terminal cancer patients envying gunshot-wound victims for the suddenness of their destruction.

Captain America is somewhat remarkable, however, as a milestone of sorts: It and Thor may be the first film franchises explicitly bred for crossover. Aliens and Predators coexisted peaceably for years before being dragged into conflict; Freddy and Jason probably admired one another’s work from afar; and the Flintstones were extinct millenia before the Jetsons came aknockin’. But this is a whole new world of husbandry. Would square Captain America have found his way to the screen without being obligated to cross streams with irreverent Iron Man in The Avengers? It isn’t only a question of brand differentiation or minority appeal. The character reeks not just of just World War II, but of a more tender wound, the post-Sept. 11 nationalist zeal, when black & white was once again cloaked in red, white, and blue. (This hasn’t totally ceased to happen; but it’s found other cloaks.) So, in an era of shady military contractors, of dribbling support for wars in Libya and Afghanistan, and reticence about Iraq, would such freestanding patriotism still play? Propaganda is the material’s essence, an infusion of Spidey’s wish-fulfilling transmutation with a jingoistic twist. This ’40s fish may need to be plucked from its water and have Tony Stark spew acid rain on its parade—not an anti-American shower, just a cynical drizzle. Steve Rodgers (Chris Evans, via digital diminution) is a morally strong weakling from Brooklyn who is allowed into the Army because, unbeknownst to him, his native virtue makes him the perfect guinea pig for being turned into a human Panzer: Captain America. A weaponized shrimp. This furrows the brow. Is he now property of the Army—lock, stock, and new barrel chest? Will he be mothballed in peacetime? When his body was enhanced did everything grow, you know, proportionally? Like Tony Stark wouldn’t ask that question! Maybe, in The Avengers, he will.

They always put the best scenes in the trailer, don’t they? (Look, if Pitchfork can do this crap, why can’t I?)

Back in the summer of ’79, Spielberg—then 32—was still considered a wunderkind, and Abrams—then 13—was still an actual kid. Both, if the ballyhoo’s to be believed, were actively making movies. And so are the mill-town kids in Super 8, who inadvertently commit to celluloid their science teacher slamming his pickup truck into an oncoming train. Out pops an alien, in comes the Army, and sploosh goes the movie as it jumps headlong over the shark—the science teacher (played by Glynn Turman, who must be tenured, as he held the same post in 1984, in Gremlins) not only survives the collision, but even has the wherewithal to wave a pistol and instill a sense of foreboding. This isn’t a bad setup, and the writer-director leaves a few trails of Reeses Pieces that I was happy to follow—a sheriff getting abducted as the gas pump goes ding-ding-ding; a whole wall fully feathered with recent lost-dog notifications; a hickey from a zombie, etc. But the dots connect, inevitably, to an arachnid asshole that would’ve eaten E.T. for tapas. We’re told that it’s been in government captivity for over 20 years, and that it’s been mistreated—and underestimated—by their top operative, Nelec (Noah Emmerich). But Nelec is an Ahab with two good legs; he’s Khan without any wrath. And his white whale’s grievances aren’t made clear. Nor, save for the dregs of a humanist attitude, are the reasons we should care about its survival. When Spielberg cordoned his creatures off in spaceships in C.E.3.K., and kept them from appearing until the very end, the gambit paid off because his audiences were still basically F/X virgins. Jaded as we are today, seeing space aliens is no big deal; withholding one for so long, and then not having anything special to show for it, comes off as pomo prudery.

I don’t want to underrate the movie, but it should be noted that it seems willfully engineered to encourage overrating. A lot of this is soggier even than my bed metaphor: The way Super 8 calls up memories, if not the substance, of blockbusters past; the “autobiographical” loving tribute to filmmaking; the passing-of-the-baton business (Spielberg, whose innocence doesn’t always age well, is one of the producers); and that perennial positive criticism: that it’s “original.” To the first, I’ll admit that the child actors—and the intimacy with which they are directed—deserve their praise. The shy-guy hero is a bit of a Mary Sue; but Joel Courtney and Elle Fanning, playing his puppy-lover, know how to keep their cuteness in check. There’s an inchoate pyrotechnician, who straddles the razor’s edge between being a future MythBuster or a future Unabomber. And, of course, the bossy fat kid, Charles (Riley Griffiths, a child-actor name par excellence), who, like myself at one point—and a multitude of others—thinks he can be a great director and a teenager all at once. But they don’t look or talk like characters drawn from Abrams’s life; they’re types. (The caped chunklet in Monster House—another homage à Amblin—was like Charles without the camera.) And the film “motif” is, for lack of a better word, undeveloped. indieWire suggests that the “script is about the fantasy of movies coming to life”—and I guess it is; but if these kids are the cineastes we take them to be, shouldn’t they be more ironical about living out B-movie clichés?

To the charge that this is “original”: Well, my guess is that if Super 8 had been released 25 years ago, it would’ve been dismissed as a retrograde E.T. (If “originality” is defined as “not based on a comic book,” then that doesn’t denote victory for Abrams—only shame for Hollywood.) Abrams ingenuously loves his influences. But when he has a frail, freaked-out woman picked off by the monster, and doesn’t pause a second to meditate on that loss, he exposes the long, uphill road that runs from his sensibility to Spielberg’s. (In terms of what he uses as drama, the director shows that he has “heart”; but his heart seems single-minded.) Abrams has his elder’s sappiness, and even a knack for his humor; but the only thing he can really call his own is the obscurantist edge to this film’s ad campaign. Except for the interminable lens flares—his movies all go nova—this seems to be the one thread that runs through his work. And what’s it all for? There’s nothing in this movie that’ll come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen anything it attempts to emulate; and there’s nothing that isn’t audience-friendly, or ripely commercial. It’s just a bluff—Abrams’s poker face is as meaningless as Lady Gaga’s. If it exposes anything, it’s his lack of faith in his own originality—in originality in general. What Abrams’s ploy represents is Spielberg’s innocence lost.

Either I’ve undergone a corporeal swap of my own in the last few sentences or I’ve simply neglected to add the other key variable to the Source Code equation: the 2009 movie Moon, the first directed by Duncan Jones, and the only—before he moved on to this. Moon was an all-too-rare hybrid: a sci-fi epic that’s indie in scope. Despite the shift in setting, from lunar surface to Midwestern metropolis, there’s a remarkable overlap between Sam Rockwell’s astronaut and Gyllenhaal’s commuter—who’s slogging between realms of reality courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, as embodied by Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright. Don’t let this cast trick you: Source Code, released by Summit Entertainment, is not “indie.” But its larger scale redounds to the filmmaker’s ripening technical skills; he’s not yet a master, but he’s found solid footing on the film industry’s own two realms of reality: artistry and commerce. (“Mastery” looks more like 12 Monkeys.) It shows in his special effects—the shorthand editing (by veteran splicer Paul Hirsch) and unusually expressive computer graphics; the lovely Venice-on-Lake Michigan skyline that seems to be smiling for him and his cameraman, Don Burgess—as well as in his handling of the cast.

Gyllenhaal has had a boyish buoyancy, along with a healthy taste for the deranged, since playing Donnie Darko; and Jeffrey Wright, as he’s proved in Angels in America and elsewhere, is a maestro of made-up dialects. (He’s doing “unctuous nerd” here: a computer programmer caught in the military-industrial complex, like a gadfly that doesn’t know it’s stuck in a spiderweb.) Farmiga, playing his subordinate, is chastely brunette—her commuter was butter-blonde in Up in the Air, to enhance her status-symbol standing—and mostly hides behind a monitor; but her immobility highlights her dexterity. She gets more out of guardedness, and the way she flicks off coworkers or shifts in her seat, than some actors can cull from effusion. Only Michelle Monaghan seems a little slighted. As Sean’s lady friend—who sees Stevens as Sean—she has a deliciously feisty grin. But she’s also, technically, D.O.A., and dead love interest ≠ happy vibes. Like The Adjustment Bureau, Source Code is a formalized Twilight Zone episode fatted with thrills. (This one’s also part Quantum Leap.) But nobody, not even Jones—a marksman who aims at melancholy—can make a bull’s-eye when trying to hit both a Hollywood ending and “hard” sci-fi.

The wrap-up is a doozie, but it doesn’t spoil the good will wrought by the first 80-or-so minutes. The filmmakers work to individualize the other passengers; so when they have Stevens cajole a comedian (Russell Peters) into performing an impromptu set, the movie may seem to be close to derailing: turning into the populist cheese that drove Frank Capra’s busload to break out in song in It Happened One Night (1934). But such consideration for subsidiary characters has sunken so deeply into desuetude—at least in most big-time genre flicks—that viewers may be surprised to find it here. Even touched. (If only they’d give it a chance….) Still, I’m happy to see that sci-fi movies are doing a little time travel of their own: Jones and Ripley, like Neill Blomkamp or George Nolfi, are putting brains back into a genre that’s been bankrupt by commercialism. Audiences are permissive now in terms of form, if not content; but popcorn movies that are both thought-out and felt might make for a happy medium.

Depending on the hermeneutic you use, the real world of the film centers around either a.) a quartet of fetching young ladies (Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, and Vanessa Hudgens) trying to escape from an insane asylum on the outskirts of Gotham City; b.) a quartet of fetching young ladies—orphans who’ve been snatched up by mobsters and conscripted for exotic dancing—trying to escape from a harem on the outskirts of any film noir; or c.) a quartet of Charlie’s Angels engaged in combat with cybernetic Nazi zombies on the outskirts of Middle Earth. I think it’s d.) none of the above. The realities in which the girls are abused and molested are oppressive and maudlin, and yet no less cartoony than fantasies in which dragons collude with Germans. Snyder, like Tarantino, contrives to use a feminist gloss to pump his exploitation flicks full of high-minded airs, but that only makes them doubly exploitive; his girls are kicking ass to fulfill young boys’ dirty-old-man dreams. (Maybe man-children have such trouble emerging from their cocoons, and even more difficulty getting laid, because they’re being bred to think that dolling up like Sailor Moon while slaying baby dragons is the substance of real girls’ reveries.) Sucker Punch is an homage to Kill Bill, and Kill Bill was nothing but homages. At least Tarantino was building on his prized collection of esoterica; Snyder seems to have never set foot outside a multiplex, just as he seems to have never picked up a novel that wasn’t graphic. (And his ear’s as dull as his eye. I’m not sure which is worse: that all of his musical choices are obvious or that half of them are emo’d covers.) There’s no imagination under this movie’s baroque surface. One might say that to heap all this slag together takes talent; but the cyborg-Nazi-zombies do nothing that their non-hyphenated brethren don’t do in other video games—err, movies. And people often confuse talent with creativity. Creativity is having ideas; talent is knowing what to do with them.

Insanity, like irony, began to seep into the mainstream in its it’s-all-in-your-head, you’re-not-crazy-the-world-is form during the counterculture ’60s; there’s a reason they called it “freaking” out. But, as Jack Shafer implied a few months ago—in an appraisal of how the edgy ontology of Philip K. Dick, the Tucson gunman’s favorite writer, has affected our pop culture—the cray-cray is here to stay. The year 1999 was a sort of watershed for Dickheaded schizophrenia: The Matrix, Fight Club, and The Sixth Sense all became über-mega-hits. American Psycho and Memento followed in 2000, proving that even mind-fucking indies could cross over and make the big bucks. Just in the past year alone, Shutter Island, Inception, Tron: Legacy, Black Swan, The Adjustment Bureau, and now Sucker Punch have all skied down the lobes of slalomed brains, bouncing between realities the way you change your socks, and viewers have sucked this brain candy down like popcorn. There may well be a kernel of hipster snobbery in this—the mentality that dictates that my favorite (Brooklyn) band loses its caché of cool if you’ve heard of it. But Dick, who died in 1982, was the underground’s man; his vision was paranoid yet critical. Sucker Punch doles him out like baby food—and reduces him to a spoonful of empty calories. If we accept “insanity” as mere entertainment, then we begin to take sanity for granted. The Dickian vanguard is valuable because it lets us look outside the box. It teaches us that taking “reality” for granted is the insanest form of complacency.

None of this means it’s very good—or necessarily worth $14 and change. The difference between Tron: Legacy and its 1982 prequel hearkened me back to a tiff I once got myself into upon claiming that the effects in Star Trek were inferior to those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Maybe the thought is native only to quixotic turns of mind, but the more realistic special effects get—the more pliable they become, the more densely packed the pixels around the digital helix—the less they seem to me, well, “special.” In C.E.3.K., the flying saucers scintillated like Christmas lights wrapping invisible trees; they were the gods’ magisterial chariots, earthbound constellations, self-illuminating nebulae: Obscurity lent to their mystery. Star Trek just played Hacky Sack with the camera, in space and on set. Laid athwart the graphics of a rogue Atari game, Tron had a Piet Mondrian austerity; the fractal patterns, bursting forth from reams of Day-Glo graph paper, were really unreal and truly unique—a contrast to the punk pastiche of Blade Runner, which came out that same sci-fi boon year. Tron: Legacy, with its Regency dining rooms and L.E.D. lounges, is more grounded in reality and too heady with neon pop pastiche. The ligne clare style of its predecessor is but one aesthetic bug caught in this virtual spider web. Even Daft Punk’s vaunted techno isn’t quite daft or punk enough. I wish they’d friended Trent Reznor; it’s too much of a movie score.

Between Avatar and Inception and Scott Pilgrim and now this, there’s been much ado about the fusion of cinema with video games—that is, much ado about nothing. There’s been an incestuous relationship between the two since the latter was in its infancy; as soon as Star Wars came out, heralding simplistic quest stories and spiffy visuals as all the rage, the film industry pounced on the burgeoning form like a creepy uncle. An ancillary market was born—even if the horny union was more like onanism than marriage. Movies were dumbed down so that they could be resold as video games; and, as their graphics developed, video games began to assume the styles and techniques of movies. I don’t think that filmmakers inspired by video games are adding much to the art of film; they’re just cramming into movies the crap that video games have already borrowed—they’re making movies even more jejune and reductive. Taken on its own, gaming can be a blast—it can even have salutary consequences. But, as Inception demonstrated, the brainpower that video games export to celluloid is only artificial intelligence.

Mark Bomback’s script, however, doesn’t kick into high gear until about halfway through; and before that, the film is like a “coaster”—a derelict locomotive that’s been cast adrift, engineless—save for the punchiness of the cast, and the director’s visual calisthenics. (It’s like pouring a can of Four Loko onto a potted plant.) But Scott feels our need for speed, and supplies it so liberally that he nearly outruns the unmanned freight train that’s on a collision course with a populous, if imaginary, pocket of Pennsylvania. The half-mile-long speeding violation benefits from its crimson paint job—borrowed from the real-life BNSF railroad; but Scott’s self-propelled Super Chief doesn’t puff vengeance from its smokestack—it lacks the anthropomorphic ire that Spielberg’s tractor-trailer fumed way back in Duel (1971). Any agency that the train does have, and any animosity that we’re invited to heap upon it, is redirected in ways that would make an A.M.-radio producerist grin with self-justification: The crisis is caused by a lazy railyard oaf; and it’s only made worse by the callously expedient folks at the top, who while the catastrophe away in board meetings or talk share prices while teeing off. (Scott’s shaky “politics” seem to run in the family.)

Still, Scott and Bomback have crammed for and passed Disaster Movie 101. I knew not to expect much when Chris Pine’s caller I.D. came up as an I.M.D.B. head shot; but Rosario Dawson, as a pert control-booth jockey, amps up the energy level in her scenes; and Pine, as a conductor, performs with some polish. That leaves the older, and blacker, half of the buddies-who-begrudgingly-come-to-respect-each other dialectic: Denzel Washington, Pine’s sagacious engineer. I don’t know how he does it. Was it in his contract that this 56-year-old hobble from car to car on top of a zippy train, even after he’s already spent an hour martyring himself for the working class? Like Morgan Freeman, he chooses roles so circumspect it’s contemptible; but Washington’s gritty charm deserves a monument. Perhaps he keeps making these crumbum buddy movies because every last soul on Earth wants to be his pal.